Within several industries, parties are often providing data to other parties across a network. Oftentimes, this data is sold from one party to another. Once the data is received, the receiving party (or purchaser) may perform various checks on the data, oftentimes with business rules associated with those checks. The checks may be performed in order to: (1) determine whether to accept the data being presented by the supplying party (or supplier); (2) determine how much the purchaser is willing to pay for the data; (3) derive or gain additional data or intelligence associated with the data presented by the supplier; and (4) determine the best way to route, and/or resource against, the data.
For example, within the online lead generation space, a seller of form data (or lead) sells data to a buyer of the form data that was collected in some manner by the seller of the form data. The buyer of the form data may take any of these actions upon receiving the data: (1) reject the data attempting to be sold based on various reasons; (2) determine how much the purchaser is willing to pay for the data; (3) append other data or intelligence associated with the presented data from the buyer's own databases and/or from a third party data or intelligence provider; and/or (4) expend resources differently based upon various rules, such as electing to place a phone call to an individual represented by the purchased data versus sending an email in order to optimize marketing for the optimal business result.
There are numerous problems with data being passed from a supplier to a purchaser, and following that, having the purchaser perform the checks and apply the rules on the data, before determining what the purchaser is going to do next with the data. The purchaser needs to see the data in order to perform its checks and rules; and if the purchaser rejects the data from the supplier, or similarly, if the purchases offers to pay a certain amount and the seller rejects the offer, after having already been exposed to that data, there is risk to the supplier that the purchaser has maintained a copy of the data and has rejected the data, or intentionally offered a lower amount, in order to not pay for it. Similarly, the purchaser may already have the data in existing databases, and reject the data presented by the supplier due to duplication. Such a scenario allows the purchaser to gain the knowledge from the data, which was represented by the supplier through an attempted sale, and allow the purchaser to act upon the existing database record, while not having utilized the actual data from the supplier to do so. This is possible because the intelligence was derived from the supplied data in order for the supplier to act upon the existing database. The purchaser can also look across its own databases for patterns of the data having been presented previously, thereby not being able to gain intelligence about where the data has existed elsewhere outside of the entity. Similarly, the supplier has the same restrictions, only having purview of its own databases, or databases exposed to the supplier, such as by the purchaser. Purchasers often have unique systems of running data checks and rules that require each purchaser to create and maintain these rules, as well as suppliers to integrate into these rules, which is much less efficient than if a third party utilized a standard methodology, whereby the purchaser would not need to create and maintain its own data checking methodologies, and suppliers would not need to integrate into multiple methodologies across their Purchaser networks.
To make the process of data transfer more efficient, some purchasers have developed systems whereby a supplier can perform a database query to the potential purchaser in order for the supplier to gain knowledge about whether the purchaser wants to accept the data and/or other information that the purchaser wants to deliver back to the supplier about the data being transferred or potentially transferred. This process allows the supplier to gain knowledge almost instantly about the purchaser's intentions, without having to necessarily transfer all the data to the purchaser, and without the purchaser being required to perform all of its checks and apply its business rules on their end, but rather the supplier can develop and maintain the systems to perform those checks and apply business rules. In certain industries, this methodology is referred to as a “pre-ping.” However, the same problems as discussed above also exist with the “pre-ping” system.